-4 x 200 gig (PCI IDE controller) These four disks are stripped together, creating a single Drive clocking in at 745.23 Gigs.

-Removable Bay (secondary IDE Slave [CD-Rom drive set as mater]) Now here is where I running into my problem. During initial setup I used a 160 gig Seagate in that drive. And every time the machine boots up it is looking for that 160 gig drive. I would like to be able to use variable sized disks in that drive, and for the life of me I can't figure it out how.

I am not sure if the issue is with BIOS or DOS, or hell the answer might even lie in XP Pro (system OS). In BIOS I have the disk capacity for the drive set to "Auto" detect, but still having same issue. (won't detect the disk in the drive unless it is the 160 seagate.

Any one have any suggestions?

[glow=Purple,2,100]Attention[/glow]- If anyone took offense to anthing herein I appologize, that was not my intention.

Post by Bill on Jul 17, 2006 12:48:55 GMT -5

What OS are you using? XP gets pretty upset if there are major hardware changes, may decide to not work at all. Not sure if your trying to upgrade the OS or simply setting up a new OS install.

What you will need to do is:

Get the bios to recognize the drives properly. if you have a raid controller they usually have a seperate bios then the system bios that you have to boot to the configure your raid set. My system for example has the normal bios for the system that you get to by hitting delete when it first boots.

Then after the bios screen, you have to press some keys like alt-f6(dependant on your card, should show a message)to get into the raid controller's bios. In the raid's bios you can configure the raid. Then your OS should see the raid as 1 big disk.

Once you have the hardware side setup correctly, in the bios you should be able to install / reinstall XP. Using more then once ide controller can be tricky.

Also, Im assuming that you've set the jumpers on the drives correctly and or are using cable select appropriately.

Be careful with a 4 stripe raid set, if you loose 1 drive you loose all of the data on the entire set. With the number of drives you have you could setup stripping with parity so if you loose a drive you won't loose all of your data.

Have no expoirence with hot swapping ide drives, but you wont be able to hot swap your OS / system disk.

Post by degicank on Jul 17, 2006 13:35:07 GMT -5

It sounds like you need a "bucket of steam" to get that hotswap working...

Hey friends, temporaily I will not be able to talk here frequently.\Don't worry I'm still working on degicontent, the next progect is the '06 back to school speacial. Any photo's art or music please send to degicank@gmail.com

To learn more about Health, Wealth and Self Mastery from The Church of Deg I CankJoin Us online or at our Headquarters Degicank.org 111 W 45th St New York, NY 10036-4004

Post by DrCank on Jul 18, 2006 6:33:14 GMT -5

All good suggestions, but I think we are at the same place here. For the record this is not a ful RAID, in fact I tought I was rather careful in never dropping that term in the description, however I may have by accident. The PCI Card is just IDE controller, and windows XP Professional is in control of the of stripping between the four disks. So I am not losing a disk of space because there is no redundancy (as mentioned the stripped drive is 745.23 gigs). But that all works perfectly.

It is getting the Bios to understand that their will be no determinate size on the drive at the slave position on the secondary IDE. It is my opinion that I would be running into this problem if there where stripped drives or not in this system, the two objects should be completely seperate.

Also I was meticulus in setting my jumpers so I dought that is the issue. The removable disks all work fine in my external removable disk housing.

[glow=Purple,2,100]Attention[/glow]- If anyone took offense to anthing herein I appologize, that was not my intention.

Post by Bill on Jul 18, 2006 11:57:39 GMT -5

In some bios' you can force the bios to use certain drive spec's. Basically, you type the specs on the drive in the bios. Heads, platters, cylinders, etc... basically turning off auto detect and setting it up manually.

Can we have a little more details on the setup? How do you talk to the fileserver? You have 2 computers?

Post by DrCank on Jul 18, 2006 16:12:59 GMT -5

I am currently running 5 machines, I don't like multi-tasking machines, 1 machine = 1 function. It allows you to customize a machine for a certain function, and though it may sound odd at first, this is the most cost effective way of living in a technologicaL universe. For one why would I need the machine i check my e-mail with, to be able to preform up to the same capabilities as the machine I do image and video editing with, it just doesn't make sense. Also why would a threaten a ripper of a machine like my graphics module by opening it up to the internet (the best firewall, is to leave the cord unplugged) jump on for updates every once in a blue moon and then disconnect again.

As for the cost effective part I mentioned, two of my machines are just to bridge A/V equipment (ie. Tv and Stereos) into my Home Media server (assuming I can get the damn thing up and running) These are built with peices others through away, weak processors, pathetic video cards (one machines function is just audio what do I care what the screen res. ia), and hard drives that would be considered a joke by todays standards (if it just holds a hand full of programs 2 gigs is more than you need). The trick is to just through a little extra RAM in them (where still talking only high end 1999, cheap by todays standards). you can spit one of these module machines for pennies on the dollar of enjoyment and use. Plus I found it is the best way to figure out how these machines work.

The main idea is know what you need, if you are never going to listen to a machine, why even bother putting a sound card in it, just because computers have sound cards?

Post by DrCank on Jul 18, 2006 16:31:31 GMT -5

Also I just want to add for those of you whom are currently not familiar with Removable disks, don't let my rants discourage you, it is still the best form of data storage on the market.

how it works is, you take a normal hard drive ( jumpers set to cord select, there should be a diagram on your hard drive that illistrates how to do this; slightly different from company to company) and install the drive into what is commonly referred to as a carraige:

these "carraiges" slide into an adapter that fits into a regular 5 1/4 disk space ( same size as a CD drive, or the old drisks back when they where floppy) it looks much like this:

most (including this model) have keys that must be in the locked postition for the drive to work. Inside a machine it looks like this (this is what I am attempting):

they are really easy to set up and it is the best dollar/gig storage device out there (you can get old Hard drives really cheap). Now how they are supposed to work is by tricking your machine with what we will call the "twin effect". You get a whole buch of disks that are the same size and set them in carraiges, you throw one of these carraiges into your machine and install it like you would any add-on harddrive. The trick is that as long as all of the drives in the carraiges are the same, when your machine boots up it can't tell the difference between the original hard drive and one of its twins, simple. the only bitch in the system is that you need to turn off your machine before you change out drives, and then restart, and all the drives need to be the same size.

What I am trying to do is use differnet sized drives, so instead of using to the "twin effect" trick, I want to use the "poke out your F**king eyes" trick. that way my machine can't see the size vaiability, or does see it and just doesn't care (it just gets tricky when you can't find the machines eyes).

Now of course there is a second way to use these removable drives, and it is the bread and butter. you mount the drive in an external hard drive case like this:

this way it is hooked to your machine via USB or FireWire, and it truly is the cats pajamas. lets say you are a pirate (though none of us are, I'm sure) and your into this whole borrowing your friends music thing. Well if he has a collection of 180 gigs of music and you only have a 150 gig External hard drive, you are going to have to make more than one trip between his computer and yours (not to mention if you don't want to delete everything on your external HDD to make more space). that is unless you, like myslef, role in style with an external removable drive, five smaller capacity internal hard drives will barely cost you a thing, hell you can find them on the street if you look around on trash night. Then it is a simple as filling the first hard drive, turning of the external hard drive casing, swap the full drive for a fresh one, turn the external casing back on (the opperating system will just think it is a whole new external hard drive plugged into the same port; which it is) and then copy some more. Cheap, fast, fun, Awsome.

And remember because the opperating system reidentifies the drive each time you turn it on, it doesn't matter what size the disks are, it only asks two things: are you there, are you formatted. Isn't technology sweet

Post by on Jul 19, 2006 6:20:00 GMT -5

You are not honestly claiming that it would take longer to grab a external Hard drive and a few extra carriages and bike across town to grab some data, then to upload and download 10s to 100s of gigs over internet. With my method you can move that amount of data in a few hours (particularly if you are using USB2 or FireWire). it would take over a week to move that much weight over the internet, unless both parties don't sleep, if thats the case it would only take about 2.5 days (oh and you better not have any upload space restrictions).

wait I guess I could email you 250 gigs worth of files, what are you doing next month?

Post by on Jul 19, 2006 13:27:30 GMT -5

Post by Bill on Jul 19, 2006 13:40:16 GMT -5

well its a catch 22. Question is are you going to be able to process 250GB in a month? and when is Philly getting their free wireless? They've been talking about it here. I think their talking about 300kps over the wireless. At that speed you could share a 1 gig of data in about 8 hours. 250 would take about 2 months at that rate. If you could do it over an adhoc 802.11g the transfer rate would be 54mbs, or 54,000kps.

Post by DrCank on Jul 19, 2006 15:58:20 GMT -5

from what I understand they are in the process of setting up pilot neighborhoods now, still facts and numbers, transmitters should follow shortly. But in a great political spin everyone keeps saying "free" wireless. I am not positive, but i think this is a misconception, I believe you still need to pay for the service. Probably a username and key system (so free if your clever). The advantage will be you can get your service every where, but the won't even work in the pilot program cause it is only going to start in select neighborhoods. We'll see

[glow=Purple,2,100]Attention[/glow]- If anyone took offense to anthing herein I appologize, that was not my intention.

Post by on Jul 20, 2006 15:11:16 GMT -5

I'm trying to figure out what to do too. Should i get a cheapo 30$ windows 2000 pent3-1.2ghz 18gigharddrive 512ram machine, and try to use either:-external USB hardrive or-external usb dvdburner

OR should i speand 10x more and get a shiny new laptop:I need at least 512mgram for school and dvdburner for degicank, I'm getting some student loan cash so I can get something nice, but I still have to pay back the loan someday so I shouldn't speand to much unless the value will be evident...

Yesterday I was out for my jog. I stopped at my meditation spot. When I started back out the trail to the street i stopped when I saw an animal in the path. Usualy an animal wil scurry away when you approach, but this guy just stood where he was. I stopped and stood off with him. My first thought was beaver, than porcipine, than otter. After about 2 minutes of me calling every bird in the area and the crows I asked the animal if i could pass on the path. He bared his teeth and claws, his shoulders came up and out and he ran about 3 steps towards me. I yelled! Backed off and ran back the way I came , all the way home. Today I was too afraid to run my circuit.